The Last President d-3

by John Barnes

  “For once, I don’t need no—any—translation. Did you see the girls that smiled at us back there?”

  “I’m not blind or dead.”

  “I am thinking this place is almost perfect.”

  “Almost? Unlike any place we’ve been recently, it’s not a totalitarian dictatorship. It’s not a few hundred desperate people hanging on in the middle of an ecological disaster. And it’s still in the States and they speak English. How is Christiansted only almost perfect?” Whorf asked.

  Ihor snorted. “Well, the girls that smiled at us back there? A bar that was cheap and had girls like that in it, that would make it perfect.”

  Whorf shook his head. “I’ve never seen a place like this before and I don’t want to try to see it drunk.”

  “Ah, in Ukraine we would say, you have the soul of a poet. But not the thirst.”

  “I’ll try Christiansted for reals first,” Whorf said. “I can blur it out later if it turns out to suck.”

  “Sailors have changed since my day.” The voice from behind them was warm with amusement.

  They turned and snapped to attention. “Captain Highbotham!” Whorf said.

  She returned the salute but she was smiling. “I’m afraid I was eavesdropping, which was rude of me, and discovered young men who are in something resembling a real conversation, and was so startled I spoke out loud. I was about to ask, though, if you’d like to come up to the observatory? It should be a pretty slow night, the moon is setting before midnight, and we always have a late supper on evenings like this. I’m afraid you’ve already walked right through the closest thing we have to a vice district,” she said.

  “You mean both bars are on this street?”

  “And as your cohort was noting, they’re pricey; the local liquor industry will need a while longer to get properly going. I’m afraid they really are about all we offer in the way of fleshpots. Can I interest you in a pleasant evening chatting with mathematicians, followed by some pretty good island cooking?”

  Whorf admired the way that it sounded like a pleasant invitation while clearly being a command. It wasn’t far out of line with what he preferred, either, and even better, it probably was out of line with what Ihor preferred.

  Shortly, they were being shown the wonders of pen-and-paper launch monitoring, and of graphical computational methods on the backs of old posters. Despite themselves, they became interested, and really enjoyed eating with the observers, though Whorf thought the pirate attack stories were considerably more interesting than the discussion of trigonometric corrections.

  Walking back to the harbor, where they would share a row-taxi taking them back to the ship, Ihor said, “Why do you think she did that?”

  Whorf laughed. “Small-town life, Ihor. Same reason my folks moved out to a tiny village on Long Island and dragged me and my brother and sisters all around introducing us to everyone. How would you feel about being drunk and rowdy and stupid in front of Abby, or Peggy, or even Henry, now that you know each other?”

  “I see.” He shook his head. “Good trick, and so much for my career as a pervert, eh?”

  “You could just as easy say she made us feel at home. The thing is, there’s stuff you don’t do at home.”

  “It was nicer than the way my uncle the first mate did that. He just told me if I ever done anything he didn’t like he hitten my head till it rang like a gong.”

  “He would be hitting,” Whorf said.

  “Be. Silly word. I don’t use it enough.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll use your share for you.” They found one row-taxi right away, and the gentle rise and fall of the boat as it cut across the smooth harbor to their ship, the exceeding peace of a town where the only light was the single lamp of the watch, and the feeling of safety after a full day’s work and a long walk, had them half asleep before they were home.

  Jorge had deck watch. “So how was shore leave?”

  Whorf said, “Ihor met an older woman with a lot of interesting experience, and he spent the whole evening with her.”

  Jorge sighed. “Oh, and me with the deck tonight.”

  “Actually,” Ihor said, “Whorf and I shared the experience. And it was truly an experience I think you can only have in Christiansted.”

  “Oh, you guys are killin’ me.”

  “Well,” Ihor said, “you have leave tomorrow, right? When I’ve got deck and Whorf’s on the bridge? If you just get off the row-taxi and take a long slow walk up the main drag, you can have a very similar experience.”

  “And it was… good?”

  “Probably the best experience available locally,” Whorf said. “Pending further research.”

  Below, in their berths, they were so tired that after only two fits of mutual giggles—one when Whorf said, “older woman,” and the other when Ihor said, “pending further research?”—they were sound asleep in their hammocks.

  SIX:

  ON PAR WITH BYZANTIUM

  THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. 6:15 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2026.

  “You always said you don’t even like kids,” Leslie Antonowicz said. She had always been the practical one in the partnership.

  Under the table, Wonder, her immense dog, made a whimpering sound that was uncannily like agreement.

  “These would be teenagers,” James Hendrix pointed out. “Nearly-finished pre-people, like Patrick and his sister.” He wore his best apron.

  Leslie had been coming to James’s house for dinner every Monday for years before Daybreak. James loved to cook and she loved to eat, with her constant outdoor sports, running, swimming, climbing, “all the amusements of a ten-year-old boy” as he liked to tease her. It had begun just after she had gently, painfully let him know that they were friends forever but a twenty-five-year age gap was just too much; now, both their distant families had been missing since Daybreak, and each was as much family as the other had.

  “So,” Leslie asked again, “all right, granted, not kids, teenagers. But why?”

  James shrugged. “Why does the RRC do anything? I hope because we think in the long run it’s for the good of the country, right? Well, weird though it is, and even knowing that Daybreak took him over, the best plan we’ve got for eradicating Daybreak and recreating our country is poor old Arnie Yang’s plan.”

  “What about that string-and-card thing Heather has?”

  “Who do you think figured out what should be on it? Arnie did the strategy and the rationale; that’s just Heather’s bureaucratic way of implementing it, and we just have to hope we don’t need a major strategic adjustment between now and January 20, 2027. The more I think about it, the more I think we screwed up royally in letting the politicians and cops execute Arnie Yang. I even suspect that his telling us it was the best way and we had to do it might have been Daybreak talking; the advantages of having him alive now really outweigh anything we gained by making an example out of him.”

  “The public wanted his blood.”

  “Oh, I know, democracy loves melodrama; that’s why it’s always a little stupid at best. But killing the only guy who could tell us how things worked or what might be going on—let alone the author of the only strategy we’ve got—was bone stupid.”

  Leslie folded her arms. “He was in process of framing me for what he was doing, and I was close to going to the gallows in his place.”

  “Well, I’m not saying he was perfect.”

  After a long pause, they both laughed. James grinned. “Of course I would rather have you to laugh about it with. And maybe Arnie was right anyway, the night before we executed him, when he said that he thought the next twenty years would be mostly a matter of getting symbolic things right, and to just keep asking ourselves what Hollywood would do. Which brings me back to why I’m going to launch this Academy of the United States idea, and right away.”

  “Arnie told you to?”

  “He said a new nation—which we’re going to be, starting over from scratch—needs living heroes, and if it doesn�
�t have them it will make them. So I think we have to raise some, here, because if we don’t, they will be raised elsewhere and we can only guess at what sort of people they’re going to be.” He lowered the door on the woodstove and drew out the baked trout to go over polenta with asparagus in a butter and pot cheese sauce. “Now, we are at perfection. There will be silent and deeply appreciative reverence for this food until it is consumed.”

  “There will be,” Leslie agreed.

  Wonder snored, too experienced to worry about people-dinner till it became dog-scraps.

  When they had finished and were enjoying the bucket of beer from Dell’s Brew that Leslie had brought along, she said, “You know, the strange thing is, you could argue I was almost born for the world after Daybreak, and I guess I can see why until you caught Arnie everyone else thought I was the Daybreak mole here. I mean, I like hard physical work, I like being out in the bush running around and doing that hard work, I don’t mind being uncomfortable if it’s a chance to be outside, all of that. I guess some ways my attitude was already halfway to Daybreak.

  “But you, James, you like comfort and clean sheets and you don’t go outside if you don’t have to, you loved cooking and classical music and guided tours to museums and all that… and I’m still convinced that if I didn’t drag you out for walks you’d be too huge to get through your own door—”

  “An accusation which is base, scurrilous, and almost certainly true.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, put that all together. Anybody’d think you’d be just barely functioning if you were even alive, and I’d be the Jungle Queen of Daybreak. But look at us.”

  “You’ve done very well,” James said. “On the RRC Board. Important missions completed. You’re a blazing success in this new world.”

  “And you’re Heather O’Grainne’s good right hand.” She drained her glass and poured another. “And brilliant at it. So I understand you are proposing this weird mix of Hogwarts and Starfleet Academy, but why do you want to run it personally?”

  He shrugged. “Probably what you’ve always called my silent arrogance. There’s no one else I trust to understand that it might be the most important thing we do. Right now we have a core of young-to-middle-aged scouts and agents who remember the old United States in their bones, who get up every morning half-expecting civilization and a President and Congress and a United States, and feel how abnormal it is not to have that.

  “But give it twenty years and you’ll have adults raising kids and voting who kind of remember central heating, and airports, but the republic will be a vague concept out of the past, on par with Byzantium—all they’ll know is that there was one. We have to make sure they see what it has to do with them; as long as there are people who remember that we were all one nation once, and what it was that bound us together, then we might not be winning but we won’t have altogether lost, either.”

  “So the Academy is like that kid at the end of Camelot that King Arthur says is his victory?”

  “Well, Pueblo is not exactly Camelot—”

  “You’re telling me. Just try finding a knight in shining armor locally—”

  “Hush, shameless. Not so much our last-ditch not-beaten-yet try at a win as much as it’s support for all the other plans; almost everything else would have to fail before that became our main hope. Meanwhile the Academy of the United States will probably be useful, isn’t likely to do any harm, and it’s one of those things like a garden or a life preserver—get it before you need it.”

  They sat in silence for a long time, and when they did talk again, it was about the ongoing search through the pamphlet files, looking for things people could use in this wild new age.

  4 DAYS LATER. MAUCKPORT, INDIANA. 8:30 AM EASTERN TIME. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026.

  Jenny sternly squelched her envy when the messenger rode up; Jeff had made it abundantly clear that as much as he had appreciated her being a volunteer messenger at the battle of Jeffersonville, and although it had undoubtedly boosted both of their popularity, there would be no repetitions “unless there’s another big mess, and I’d just as soon not have any more of them.” At least he had conceded that since she had remained completely quiet and unobtrusive in his headquarters, it was silly to pretend she’d be in the way there, or more out of danger elsewhere.

  So she knew what was going on, which was better, but every messenger seemed to come in from the big, interesting world outside, and she couldn’t help thinking how much more interesting it was out there.

  And just in case of another big mess, she’d equipped Buttermilk with two saddlebags: one with rations, canteen, and extra ammo, and the other empty, in case someone happened to hand her a dispatch. Can’t hurt to be prepared.

  This messenger wore regular-Army Rorschach jammies and a Stetson he’d probably gotten from the TexICs. He was slim and short, and had a strange band of tattoos around his eyes, something a rebellious high school student might have sported back before. Jenny wondered if he’d lied about his age, or if anyone even checked age anymore. Maybe he just looks young because of the tattoo, or that bewildered expression.

  Jeff read the dispatch. “Corporal, what’s your name?”

  “Dave McWaine, sir.”

  “I’m asking because we’ll be talking a little while. Try to relax, you’re doing your job, and don’t worry about what I might prefer to hear. Did you come directly from Colonel Prewitt?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he tell you what the dispatch was about?”

  “No, sir, but I did guess it. He was standing right there looking at where their campsite had been, and they’re gone. Nothing left but the spots of yellow grass where their tents were, the paths they trampled, a few big piles of bodies, and the charred spots where they had cookfires. Not a trace.”

  Grayson nodded. “And those were the things I was going to ask about. Any other evidence that you remember or comes to your mind?”

  “It was, well, cleaner than a Daybreaker camp usually is, sir. I think that just means they left a while ago, ’cause we had that big rainstorm yesterday, and it probably washed away a lot of the shit. Sorry, sir.”

  Grayson smiled. “I am aware that soldiers sometimes use the word ‘shit,’ Corporal. I was just thinking of using it myself.”

  Late that afternoon Bambi Castro flew low over the camp and dropped a reconnaissance dispatch: the whole Daybreaker horde had fled more than thirty miles northward, past Palmyra, and was still moving at a near run, leaving their dead and exhausted behind on the road.

  Grayson looked from face to face in the darkening room, and said, “Well, that’s why the patrols didn’t catch them and won’t catch them. Those men will be coming in all night; make sure they’re fed and they get a decent place to sleep, since I made them ride so hard all day for nothing. We’ll send a fast advance guard downstream—have them go out at dawn, and see if it’s the same situation at the next camp. I have an awful feeling it will be.”

  “Why ‘awful,’ sir?” The militia colonel who asked that looked like she should be someone’s grandmother. “It puts us ahead of schedule if nothing else.”

  “Our schedule was built around being ahead of their schedule. Now they’ve changed it. They won’t have changed it to put themselves behind. Have the tech people set up a radio, for keyed transmission, and give me the voice option too, in case General Phat wants to call back.”

  If he’s in a hurry to talk to Shorty Phat, Jenny thought, the situation is much more serious than it’s ever been before.

  THE NEXT DAY. FACILITY 1, PUEBLO. 7:15 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026.

  James had a meeting later that day, and if he could get anything out of 162, he needed it for the meeting. He knew this had been happening a great deal, lately, but he didn’t see any way around it. Jason was grumpy about coming out to be the backup and stabilizer, but there was apt to be violence, and Izzy was just too small and Beth was pregnant.

  Jason understood that as well as James, but
seemed to feel entitled to be grouchy anyway.

  This time, however, Interrogation Subject 162 was wide awake when they got there. They ran through several exercises which should have triggered seizures, and none did; to all appearances, Daybreak was not active in 162 today.

  At last, seeing no clever approach, James asked directly. “So here’s what we are wondering about. Not only did the tribals pull out of Mauckport before we got there, but air reconnaissance shows that they’re pulling back all the way along the line, everywhere, not only abandoning the camps where they were living for months, but scattering and taking different ways home to their tribal camps, traveling in groups of a couple dozen or so. And very often the camps are emptying out too, with tribals heading north and east. It looks like a wide area retreat.”

  “Daybreak is sort of a living thing. That’s probably why it’s less active in my mind today; it’s trying to hide, retreat, crawl back under its rock like an octopus, you see? It’s been burned badly and it’s scared and trying to back up. If you press it now—especially if you drive right at the head—you might might might—”

  162 began to wave his arms around and fell thrashing to the floor. When he emerged from the seizure, he seemed even more lucid. “Look, you do more than just establish that Daybreak is in retreat. This is where you can turn the war against Daybreak into part of the new national mythology for the Restored Republic. And that mythology is truly vital; you can’t just give people 2023 back in 2028 and say, here we are, everything is normal, sorry about nine-tenths of you dying off in the last five years. The Restored Republic won’t be the old one, and it needs myths of its own, stories like Lexington and Shiloh and the Bulge that define it, that have heroes who can be held up as models, not because the children will really model themselves after them, but because everyone can have the experience of agreeing about the greatness. Well, ‘we beat them up and they backed off and went home for the summer’ is not a great myth, and it won’t make any heroes. ‘We drove right to the enemy capital and smashed it till not stone stood upon stone,’ that’s a myth, and one that’s going to have some heroes. So pick a target—this Castle Earthstone sounds like a good one—and pour it all into taking it and smashing it. Make yourself some heroes.”